Traveling Companions

The younger Bach-Lombardos in 2003, at the almost-top of Mount Bisoke in Rwanda.

One of the gifts of travel is making new friends and then bumping into them again, physically or virtually. So when I received an email last week saying that a Belgian friend from our year in Rwanda, Patrick Kelders, had just published a book about his humanitarian work in Africa, called Si peu d’humanité (So little humanity), I was instantly transported back seven years. Patrick, his wife Sophie Dumont, and their sons Nathan and Sebastien, were good travel buddies. Although we all lived in Kigali and inhabited the even smaller world of l’Ecole Belge de Kigali (where Jordan and Matthew, then 12 and 7, went to school with Nathan and Sebastien, then 6 and 4), we only first met Patrick when climbing Mount Bisoke in the Virungas. (This climb was a sort of consolation prize for our boys, who didn’t meet the minimum age for gorilla trekking; on our hike, we were close enough to see gorilla poop and even hear a grunt or two.) Later, both families traveled north again, to the “Belgian Riviera” town of Gisenyi on Lake Kivu.